Tuesday, October 14, 2014

"The real trick to producing great work isn't to find ways to
eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your
depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re
all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to
be."

“I have rewritten this paragraph at least five times. Which
is why wordcount is irrelevant, if they’re the wrong words.”

“Authors telling other people how to be authors is like parents telling other people how to be parents. Because all kids are the same.”

*Note: I don't know how to use Twitter. I don't know how to cite (?) it appropriately? I just sometimes use the Web to eavesdrop on other people's tweets.

A lovely essay on a video game and the Asian-American experience

. . . because it sometimes seems that the world is a horrible place and the news is all Bad Things Happening. . . and it's just nice to see a lovely, lovely essay like this. And the reader comments are all lovely, too! People are good, after all.

Monday, October 13, 2014

On turning 40 and things I've seen and read: Fate/Zero, A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Magicians. Ways to make yourself melancholy during these gorgeous autumn days.

It’s two
months before I turn 40. But I’ve been mourning the end of my thirties for the
last year.

40 is when
you have to recognize, finally, that there are doors you’ve passed which will
never open to you; there are paths which are forever blocked. “Way leads on to way,” as the poet said, and you will never find your way back to that turning
point in the golden wood. Of course, I’ve been realizing this throughout my
thirties. It’s just that the finality of that number, “40”—the thudding close
of a decade—has a new hardness that drives the point home.

One of the
things I’ve been thinking about lately is failure, and of how it is not
something talked about in our world. All our cultural narratives are of
success. We tell our children that they can do anything, as long as they work
hard enough and believe. We encourage people to follow their dreams. We love
stories about underdogs, about people rising above adversity. When we read
about failure, it’s almost always as a prelude to a story of success: Steve
Jobs is humiliatingly ousted from Apple, but eventually returns in triumph to
lead it to new heights of glory. A musician or artist or writer or sports star or
someone flames out. . . but claws
back to even greater achievement. Failure teaches lessons, the business blogs
intone. You learn from failure. It’s
just a step, a lesson, in the eventual road to success.

We don’t read
about the ones who never made it. We don’t tell the stories of the people who
left their fields entirely and forever, of the failures that were permanent and
career-destroying. We don’t want to read about someone who ruined his marriage.
. . and then never got a second chance, never
found love again.

I was
thinking of this partly because I saw the end of the anime series, Fate/Zero, last
week.** And oh my god, it’s probably the most nihilistic thing I’ve ever seen.
This action fantasy anime makes Game of Thrones look like lollipops and
rainbows. In a way, the series is about nothing but failure. Mages and legendary
heroes compete in a seven-way battle for a holy grail. . . and it’s nothing but
characters suffering horribly and dying in vain for empty, broken ideals. For
love that is not requited. For the sake of loved ones who don’t deserve that
love. Characters have the best of intentions, and they sacrifice and work so
hard, and all their efforts make things
worse. Pretty much all of them fail in what they set out to do. . . and the
“success” stories are not what the audience (most of us, anyway) really want to
see. These are the heroic tropes of fantasy all turned on their heads and
shaken with a vengeance.

There’s
failure in real life. But we don’t usually want to see failure in fiction. We
want the Hero’s Tale. And we want the Hero’s Tale in our nonfiction, as well—in
the inspiring stories on business blogs and inspirational websites and feature
articles in magazines. What kind of narratives do we have to deal with failure
and the mature acceptance of failure? I think part of the reason Fate/Zero struck
me so hard (beyond being amazingly well done) is that it is such an inversion of the usual fantasy
adventure tropes. After all, the Hero’s Eventual Triumph (even if in
simultaneously tragic or bittersweet form) is practically embedded in the DNA
of modern fantasy adventure.

And it’s in
pretty much all mainstream fiction, too. Even in most of the “literary” fiction
I’ve read.

***

Another thing
I finished last week was Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize winning book, “A Visit
from the Goon Squad.” The “goon” in the title is time itself (“Time’s a goon,
right?” a washed-up rock star says to his publicist). The book consists of
linked short stories featuring characters who often seem to have only the most
tenuous of connections with one another. However, as the book progresses, more
connections between characters appear, until one sees at the end that everyone
is linked in a complicated and mostly invisible web that even they are not
fully aware of. Time itself is the book’s main theme, and the stories leap
forward and backward in time in a way that can be formally thrilling. We see
characters at different stages of their lives, in non-chronological order. During
the course of ordinary life, we see characters fail. And some of the failures
are actually more than ordinary—they’re spectacular. A New York publicist at
the top of her game throws a celebrity party that goes so disastrously wrong
that she ends up in jail. . . and later, at the bottom of her life, accepts a
position as freelance publicist for a genocidal dictator, just to make ends
meet. A celebrity profile writer fears that his serious writing career is
circling the drain. . and tries to rape
the actress he’s interviewing (jail time for this one, too). Washed-up rock
stars abound. Marriages and relationships end. Time is a goon, and beats up
everyone in the end.

It’s not really
a dark book, however, and certainly not grimdark. For one thing, much of it is
very funny—particularly the chapter on the publicist and genocidal dictator,
which is wonderfully satirical. There’s an often remarkable and formal inventiveness
to these tales. And though there’s plenty of heartbreak, there’s no nihilism
here. This book is too human for that. Characters lose, and fail, but they also
grow and succeed and find redemption. Interestingly, though, that redemption
often feels muted. We see characters
at the nadir of their lives, but we’re often not shown those moments of growth
and redemption; we’re often just told that it’s occurred, years later. We know
that troubled kleptomaniac Sasha eventually grew up, married her college
sweetheart and had two children . . . but we don’t know how she pulled herself
together to do these things. And this book knows that despite appearances,
there really aren’t any happily-ever-afters. The chapter narrated (okay, given
in Powerpoint format) by Sasha’s daughter shows a family that is loving but
also troubled in very human ways. Sasha does grow up, and her life by the end
is definitely better than her life at the beginning, but even then “. . .she
was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her.”

“I don’t know
what happened to me,” a minor character says at the end of the book, nearly in
tears to a man he barely knows. “I honestly don’t.”

“You grew up,”
the other character replies.

And that’s
the real story in “A Visit from the Goon Squad”: the story of ordinary people
suffering time’s slings and arrows, struggling, growing disillusioned, soldiering
on and growing up. It’s a good book, completely deserving of a Pulitzer. It is
also, in the end, a somewhat melancholy book. There is a great, triumphant
fist-pumping moment of improbable glory toward the end. . . but the book ends on
a lament for time’s passing. We’re all growing older, the last pages seems to
say; it can’t be stopped, and none of us know what the future will bring.

***

I blogged about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy before. This is also a story about
growing up in our contemporary world, though told with the language and forms of
fantasy. But while the characters in “A Visit from the Goon Squad” often seem
to grow up merely as an inevitable side-effect of drifting through time. . .
something more deliberate seems to happen in the last volume of the The
Magicians series. Quentin Coldwater and his friends are seen actively
confronting past traumas and taking the steps required to grow up. Quentin is
seen in the process of coming to terms with his own limitations, accepting past
disappointments, learning to put others ahead of himself and becoming a fully
functional, adult human. The ending notes are of wonder and hope. At age 30,
Quentin is ready to embark on a rich adult life. He’s not a washed up rock star
or record producer on his fifth wife (as in A Visit from the Goon Squad). He’s
a bit older than the traditional young adult hero; he’s coming-of-age arc took
longer than most. But he’s still young, and there’s still a sense of wild
possibility. There is just now the sense that he is mature enough, adult
enough, to handle it.

***

I’m almost 40,
and there are many times when I still don’t feel adult enough to handle it. I
love coming-of-age tales, yet I don’t feel that I’ve really come-of-age. I
haven’t sunk to the depths of some of Egan’s characters in “A Visit from the
Goon Squad,” but. . . but I suppose I do see my life reflected, partially, in
the complicated, light-and-dark patterned lives of her characters. How do we
handle failure in real life? How do we handle disappointment and and aging and our
own limitations? Most of us, happily, do not live in a hopeless grimdark universe like Game of Thrones or Fate/Zero (not in the modern Western world, at any rate).
But do we get to grapple with our issues with the clean, narrative resolution
of Quentin in The Magicians? Egan sidesteps some of that hard grappling work
altogether, flashing forward and backwards in time, showing us characters at
their bottom and then happily married to a second wife years later. The inner
work of growing up—how hard that is to depict. How hard it is to do.

**Note that I Fate/Zero is actually a prequel to the series Fate/Stay Night. Which I am watching in the hopes that redemption and goodness will triumph(?) at least a little bit (?) after all.

Disclosure: I received this book as an electronic advance
review copy from the author. Nelson and I have followed each other on social
media for some years now, and I consider her a friend.

The Petunia of this charming children’s book is not a “princessy”
girl. She doesn’t like frilly dresses and pretend princess parties. She would
rather climb trees and play ball and build towers with blocks. She feels lonely
in a neighborhood where are all the other little girls dress like princesses
and seem to prefer more stereotypically “feminine” past times.

In the end, Petunia learns a lesson about acceptance. But
it’s not the lesson you might expect.

Petunia doesn't have to learn to accept herself. She accepts
herself and her tomboyish ways just fine. What she learns, when a new princess
moves in next door, is an acceptance of others. The new girl wears a flouncy,
sparkly dress and a crown. So Petunia dismisses her and runs off in
disappointment. But then she learns that the new girl, Penelope, actually likes
climbing trees and playing ball and doing all the typically “tomboy” stuff that
Petunia likes, too. She just likes to do many of these things while also
wearing a princess dress. And then some of the other
princesses in the neighborhood also turn out to like some of these things.
There are even enough princesses who like sports to have a proper soccer game!

Nelson’s book is a charming story about looking past
appearances, and realizing that people are multifaceted. It’s about ignoring the
false dichotomy that movies and television and our culture at large often seem
to want to impose: that women and girls can be pretty and feminine and vapid,
OR they can be serious and smart like a
guy, in which case they can’t possibly be interested in shoes or dresses.

It’s the idea that a woman can be a pretty, airheaded
cheerleader OR a smart, geeky, badly dressed scientist.** She can be tough and
athletic OR pretty and fragile.

She can be a kickass Arya Stark who couldn’t care less what
she wears OR she can be a Sansa who sews well and likes dresses.*** She can’t be
both.

“The book came out of my frustration with the way our
culture seems to write off little girls who love princesses, as if they can’t also
love all sorts of other things.”

In another blog post, Nelson wrote of her personal
experiences in struggling to integrate her “feminine side” with the career
culture of science (she’s a trained biochemist as well a children’s book author).
As she wrote in that post:

“. . . maybe we
can all work on remembering that most people have multiple interests, and there
should be absolutely nothing incongruous about a cheerleader who is also an
awesome mathematician.”

Petunia, the Girl Who Was NOT a Princess, celebrates the idea that, yes, girls can be
multifaceted and a “princess” can do anything! As can Petunia, a girl who doesn't want to be a princess. . . and that’s fine, too!

All in all, this
is a charming book. The illustrations are adorable and whimsical, and the story
moves quickly. There’s lightness and humor, and the story will capture kids’
interest even while parents can ponder (and perhaps later discuss) some of the
deeper issues invoked. The book also depicts diversity in more than one way. The
titular Petunia is depicted as white, while the princess Penelope (the girl who
shows Petunia that you can catch lizards and build towers while in a frilly
dress) is black. A number of other characters are shown as people of color, and
one of Petunia and Penelope’s playmates is a boy in a wheelchair.

So the big test
for any children’s book is. . . what do children think of it? My youngest
daughter is seven, and we read this book together last weekend. My daughter is
NOT a princess, and has adamantly not been a princess for a while. Did she see
herself in Petunia? I think so. But interestingly, it seems that she had already
realized that girls could dress like princesses but still play ball and catch
lizards. It seems she already knows that people can have a range of interests, and that you should't judge by appearances.

A book is more than
a message, of course. What my daughter loved was not any moralizing theme, but
the story itself. She loved Petunia and Penelope’s adventures; she laughed at the
way that the girls “charm the King of the Forest Lands into joining them for
tea.” She loved the pictures and whimsy, particularly the way that Penelope
does actually seem to live in a castle.

My daughter was
feeling a little ill at bedtime when we read this story together, but she was
smiling when we were done. She said she would like the hardcover version. So
two endorsements here, from both mother and daughter. My daughter is at an age
when she (still) thinks girls can do anything, and this lovely book is one to
reinforce that idea with lightness and charm.

**I trained as a
scientist (cell biology) and spent years in academic science. It’s
true that most of us are casually dressed in the lab, but that doesn’t always
mean badly dressed. . . and I did know a few sharp dressers. But the thoughts
that Nelson shares in this blog post absolutely ring true to me, too. She's not the first woman I know who was regarded as perhaps being "not serious enough" because she actually liked to dress up instead of wearing the standard grad school attire of jeans and a T-shirt.

***Of course, many fans hope that Sansa will eventually grow up to kick ass in her own way. I've finished the fifth book and it hasn't happened yet (ducking the anger of fervent Sansa-fans now).